Keyboarding for the Christian School

Posted by Lorren on May 31, 2010

It has been a long time since I taught myself how to type. I waited until I was in middle or high school to learn. Nowadays, my three-year old pecks at a typewriter. Learning how to type (at an earlier age) is more valuable than ever.

This is where Keyboarding for the Christian School comes in. I was recently sent a copy to review. Because my daughter is in the second grade, we took a look at the elementary school version, but there is a version for middle and high school students.

There are a lot of things that I like about this book. It goes through the keyboard systematically, just like I learned to type when I was in school. There are periodic reviews. Once you start learning how to type sentences, your child gets to type Bible verses. This book also teaches the number pad and gets into some basic word processing. The book has some time tests towards the end, but it’s mostly focused on learning the positions of the keys and actually learning to type. This is a good thing for my daughter, who is a perfectionist and doesn’t like the pressure of a timer.

There are a few things that I don’t care about in this book, and it’s fairly minor. They use Times New Roman font, which is great for word processing, but scrunches up some of the letters together so it’s harder to differentiate each word when you’re trying to learn to type. I personally think that a fixed-width font would have been preferable for most of the book; the one exception being the word processing section at the end. They also use the New International Version for the verses; this might be preferable to many people, but my church likes to use the King James Version, so there might be some confusion there.

Overall, this is a pretty good book. While it’s likely that a secular book would work just as well (or a program like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), this book is a good choice if you want to use a book, and you want to incorporate Christian beliefs into your typing program.